Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries)

 

 

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‘And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.’

T.S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’

 

S
issy stepped out into the yard and lit her first cigarette for two days. She was trying to quit, but while she was waiting for Mina Jessop to show up she had read her own fortune and the cards had given her a warning that she had never seen before.

Two storms coming, both at once
.

Mr Boots her black Labrador jostled past her and bounded out onto the grass. He lifted his leg against the leafless cherry tree, and shook himself, and then he stood still, listening, looking around. Occasionally he glanced toward Sissy, as if he expected her to explain what was happening.

Her yard was sheltered by a steep slope and a stand of tall fir trees, but all around her she could hear the wind getting up, and the first few flakes of snow came whirling down and settled on her shawl. The wind was whispering and rustling everywhere, like ghosts in other rooms. She couldn’t hear any traffic, or dogs barking. She felt as if she were the only person in Litchfield County left alive.

She drew deeply at her cigarette and blew out smoke through her nose. She didn’t really enjoy smoking outside, but she was expecting Trevor to come around at four o’clock and she couldn’t stand his disapproving sniffing.

Trevor disapproved of everything about her. He disapproved of her wild white hair, and the odd collection of art-nouveau pins she used to fasten it into a bun. He disapproved of her long black dresses and her lace-up boots and her layers of multicolored hand-knitted sweaters. He disapproved of her dangly silver earrings and all the silver necklaces she wore.

‘You look like a fortune-teller, momma, from a traveling carnival,’ he told her.

And yes, she supposed she did. But she
was
a fortune-teller. She could read people’s tea-leaves and see at once if they were going to be happy. She could look at the palms of their hands, and see how well they were loved. She could sometimes coax a ouija board into giving her a garbled message from beyond, A JNE WEDNIG. Her specialty, though, was the DeVane cards, a rare pack printed in France in the eighteenth century, almost twice the size of the Tarot, more like table mats than playing cards. They were called ‘The Cards of Love,’ and when she was laying them out, Sissy could almost
taste
the various sweetnesses of human affection. As sickly as syrup, sometimes; or tinged with bitterness, like blood.

Occasionally, however, the DeVane cards predicted that something bad was going to happen. They could warn you if your illicit love affair was about to be blighted by an unexpected diagnosis of cancer; or if you might be paralyzed in a car-wreck, or ski slap-bang into a tree. They could tell you if your friends were saying vicious things about you, behind your back, or if your husband was making love to a girl who was barely out of orthodontic braces.

This afternoon, when she had laid out her cards on the coffee table, Sissy had turned up two Predictor cards. On the first card, two men in gray topcoats were sheltering from a downpour under a monstrous black umbrella. On the second, a man and a boy were walking hand-in-hand across a snowy cemetery, with the snow still falling on the headstones. The boy’s face was as pale as a moonlit window.

The right-hand Predictor was supposed to foretell the
worst
that could happen, while the left-hand Predictor was supposed to foretell the
best.
Usually, when a storm card came up, a sunny card came up, too; or at least a promise of settled weather.

Sissy had never turned up two storm cards together, not like this, and she couldn’t tell exactly what this meant, except that there was serious trouble coming, of one kind or another, and that there was no escaping it.

‘What’s happening, Mr Boots?’ she asked, out loud. Mr Boots made a curdled noise, deep in his throat. ‘The cards said two storms coming, both at once. What do you make of that?’

She finished her Marlboro, right down to the tip, and then she crushed it out in the geranium pot next to the back door, pushing it right below the surface of the soil so that Trevor wouldn’t see it.

‘Come on, Mister,’ she said, and went back into the kitchen, where it was warm, and filled up the kettle.

 

A
s they passed Cannondale, Howard glanced down at the gas gauge and saw that the needle had crept below half full. ‘Shit. I’ll have to stop for gas.’

Sylvia was frowning at her roots in the illuminated vanity mirror. ‘For God’s sake, Howard. Can’t you fill up on your way to the office tomorrow?’

‘It won’t take long. There’s a gas station right up ahead.’

‘Howard, I need to get home. My chicken is going to be pot-roasted to rags.’

But through the grayish-green three o’clock gloom, Howard had already fixed his eyes on the yellow Sunoco sign in the middle distance. ‘If you’re worried about your chicken, call Lisa and have her switch the oven off.’

‘Just because your father had a fetish about never letting your gas tank go below half.’

‘It’s not a
fetish
, Sylvia. It’s common sense. Look at that sky, for Pete’s sake! Is that impending snow or is that impending snow? Supposing we get stranded all night. How do you think we’re going to stay warm?’

‘Howard, it’s less than forty minutes home. There isn’t going to be a blizzard between then and now.’

Howard went deaf. That was Howard’s response to anything he didn’t agree with. He wasn’t an argumentative man, but things had to be done a certain way. Life was a series of potential catastrophes and if you didn’t take sensible precautions then one or more of those catastrophes would happen to you. He never tired of coming into the kitchen when Sylvia was cooking and reading out loud from the
News-Times
about avoidable accidents.

‘A 53-year-old Sherman man broke his back when he fell off the roof of his house while clearing leaves from the gutter. George Goodman will be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. His wife Mrs Martha Goodman blamed an unsecured ladder.’

Howard had let out a ‘
Hah!
’ of incredulity. ‘She blames the
ladder
? A ladder is an inanimate object. A ladder can’t see that an accident is waiting to happen. Why doesn’t she blame the idiot who climbed up it without making sure that he asked a friend to hold it for him?’

Sylvia, cutting out pastry rose petals for the top of her apple pie, had said, ‘Don’t you think the poor man has been punished enough?’

Howard checked his rear-view mirror, flicked his right-turn signal and slowed down. A red Datsun had been following them all the way from Norwalk, much too close for Howard’s liking, considering the slippery road conditions, and Howard wanted to make sure that the Datsun’s driver was fully aware that he (Howard Stanton) was pulling off the highway.

‘I don’t know why that A-hole didn’t ask me for a tow.’ This was Howard’s response to anyone whom he considered to be tailgating.

He pulled into the gas station, stopped, and switched off the engine. Sylvia twisted herself around to look at the wicker basket on the back seat. ‘It sounds like he’s asleep,’ she smiled.

‘Well, don’t wake him up. I couldn’t stand any more of that pathetic whining.’

‘Let me just check that he’s OK.’

‘Of course he’s OK.’ Howard opened the storage box in the center arm-rest and took out a brown wooly bobble-hat and a pair of brown wooly gloves. He pulled the hat on and tugged it down low. He always thought it made him look like Richard Dreyfuss in
Jaws
. Sylvia secretly thought that it made him look like Bert, from
Sesame Street
.

While Howard was fastidiously tugging on his gloves, finger by finger, she unfastened the basket, lifted the lid and peeked inside. There, fast asleep on a folded-up tartan shawl, was a glossy black Labrador puppy, only just old enough to be separated from his mother.

‘Suzie’s going to love him to pieces.’

‘I don’t know. He’s a little snappy, don’t you think? I just hope he doesn’t have behavioral problems. I’m not sure we shouldn’t have gone for the bitch.’

‘Oh, Howard, he’s adorable.’

Howard opened the Explorer’s door and climbed out. It was breathtakingly cold outside, and there was a ragged crosswind blowing from the north-north-west. He unscrewed the gas cap and started to fill up the tank.

The A & J Gas Station was situated on Route 7 at the Branchville intersection. Now that it was growing dark, the road was almost empty, except for an occasional thundering truck laden with Christmas trees. On the opposite side of the road stood a boarded-up hut that looked as if it had once been a grill and diner, with a rusty old pickup outside it, supported on bricks, and a dirty bronze Chevy Caprice parked at the side. Beyond the hut there was nothing but woods.

The gas station was brightly lit and Howard could see the cashier behind the counter, his chair tilted back, his sneakers on the counter, watching television. Howard deplored self-service. Why should the cashier sit in the warm, doing nothing at all, while the customer had to shiver out here in the wind, and end up with his hands reeking of gas? The pump was slow, too, which irritated him even more.

Sylvia knocked on her window, and waved to him. He gave her a quick grimace but didn’t wave back. There was a fine rain flying in the wind and he was sure that it was cold enough to snow.